The Book of Fire (74 page)

But just as he’s bottoming out in an agony of guilt and indecision, they both get a kind of answer. The whole room shudders gently, and then again. Paia sways, reaches out to catch her balance, and finds Baron Köthen’s waiting arm. She sees he is relieved to have something to do. She smiles at him gratefully as he realigns the sword sheathed across his back so that the hilt does not point at her eyes. She’d almost forgotten he was there. She’s gratified that he hasn’t forgotten her.

“Quake?” mutters N’Doch. “You get those here?”

“No.” The Librarian taps at his console and the tracking map reappears on the wall screen. The moving colored blips have converged somewhere over what Paia now realizes to be the practically endless ocean. The room tilts again, even more faintly.

Leif hugs his daughter closer. “Has he found us already?”

“Sir, that is Lord Earth,” Erde insists primly. “Keeping him away.”

The Librarian points at the blips. “Long way battle. Echo just.”

N’Doch leans in. “Wow. The fight? Can you get any visual?”

The Librarian searches for a working sensor at the indicated location, a buoy, a satellite, anything. The screen splits into four, then sixteen images, a lot of them static, the rest showing open water and empty sky.

“Shud be deah somweah, ri’?” worries Stoksie.

“Look!” Mattias cries. “There!”

He points at a screen. The Librarian quickly enlarges it, but all that’s visible is a faint smoke trail.

N’Doch mutters, “Hope we ain’t looking at no crash n’ burn there.”

Erde grabs his arm. “We have to try to reach her! We have to do it now! Oh, what if they’re . . .”

Abruptly, the big imagine breaks up in static, plunging the room into near darkness. Only the pinpoint lights on the console offer any sense of direction. The children cry out, a chorus of awed expectation, as if this were planned solely for their entertainment. Sure enough, the screen flashes to life again.

Paia gasps, a half second before Erde does the same. “There it is!”

It’s the landscape,
her
landscape, the pristine first version. It fills the entire wall with soothing green and breathless blue and tinkling silver. It’s more like a wall blown away to the outside than a picture on a screen. Now she knows what the place is. She’s been there in the meld, and it looks as actual now as it did then. The meandering river makes soft music. The breeze in the branches ruffles her hair and tickles her nose with pine scent and flowers.

“Oh, Deep Moor!” the girl exclaims. “Oh, Gerrasch! Where did you find such a painting? It’s so . . .”

“A photo, girl,” N’Doch says. “But it’s . . . wow, it’s really . . . real!”

When they take a step forward, Paia moves with them. She recalls what the God said: the painting is a portal. Is it a portal here as well? It certainly looks like they could walk right into the tall grasses stirring gently where the wall meets the floor. There’s a path there, narrow and curving, just wide enough for single file. It leads down a soft slope toward the riverbank, and the luscious shade of broad-leafed trees.

Behind her, the children exude a collective sigh. Paia takes another step forward, but a firm hand holds her back.

“Warte! Das ist nur eine Täuschung!”

An illusion, he says, her lover to be, her new protector. His antique language is in her head since the meld. He eases her back against him without force or presumption. How remarkable that, having exchanged at most three words, they already have an understanding, that satisfaction postponed due to circumstances will be all the sweeter. N’Doch has reached to snatch Erde back as well, just as the image starts to break up. Paia fears it’s the quake returning, but it’s the image evolving, exactly as the painting did. Clouds move up along the verdant profile of the mountains, the sky darkens, the glowing vista dims. The river hardens to solid white. When snow starts to fall, Paia shivers, though she has never seen real snow before. She is thankful for the heat of the baron’s body. His breath is steady at her ear. She senses him taking possession, final and absolute, and in her head, she gives herself utterly. He will never desert her or do her harm. She is as sure of him as she is of anything since waking up to find that nothing in her world is what it seemed to be.

But the comfort he offers cannot dispel the very real chill that rises in her gut as the idyllic valley is smothered in ice and snow, then racked by howling gales that whirl the flakes into a blinding whiteness. The winds drive the drifts before them in a scourge of icy needles that scour the forests and fields until the frozen land is exposed and barren. Then comes the melt, and with it, rain, in sheets and torrents, shredding the last leaf, shearing off branches, tearing the bare trees up by the roots. The little river swells to an angry flood choked with mud and boulders. The valley sinks beneath it.

Paia hears weeping, feels the ache in her chest as if it were her own. But it’s Erde, huddled like the child she really is, against tall N’Doch’s side.

“Is it happening now?” she sobs. “Is it happening now?”

“Now’s a relative thing, girl,” soothes N’Doch.

“Then what does it mean?”

Poor girl. She’s had to grow up so fast. Paia understands how awful that can be. Impulsively, she moves up beside them, away from the security of the baron’s aura, compelled
by the kinship of the meld to offer comfort as they watch the valley flood, melt, then dry up under the sudden, searing heat of a sun as relentless as the one outside. The trees shrink and wilt, or burst into spontaneous flame. The river thins, then vanishes. The grass shrivels. As the color bleaches away, from green to brown to beige, Erde buries her face in N’Doch’s arm, shuddering.

“No, please, Gerrasch, no more! Make it stop! Make it go away!”

“Cannot.” The Librarian’s hoarse voice startles them. He’s there behind them, his stooped shoulders tight with pain and knowledge. “Cannot. Not me. The One speaks.”

“She walks in light,” someone murmurs in the darkness behind. Paia hears a sound she knows well, the rustle of awed worshipers falling to their knees.

The girl lifts her eyes, stares again at the screen. “Oh . . .?”

Paia says, “I saw it, too . . . my painting . . .”

“Yes. You, too. Wake-up call.”

“But why does she show us Deep Moor?” Erde asks.

The Librarian’s stubby arms lift and sink back helplessly. He has only the vision to offer, not its explanation.

“Damn!” N’Doch mutters. “I hate to think of it looking just like it does around here.”

“It used to be green and fertile around here, too,” Cauldwell reminds him. “Once upon a time.”

Baron Köthen speaks up unexpectedly, a low-voiced question, almost a growl.

“Tough one, Dolph,” says N’Doch.

From his crouch on the floor, Leif Cauldwell chuckles. It’s as bitter a sound as Paia has ever heard from this man she thought she knew as well as any. “No, it’s not,” he says.

“Whatsit?” asks Luther.

N’Doch translates. “He wants to know . . . who has destroyed the earth, God or Man?”

“Das easy,” Stoksie mutters.

“Well, tell him,” says Cauldwell. “It’s no theological conundrum. It’s not like we don’t know.”

N’Doch shrugs. “We did it, Dolph. A long time after yours. God had nothing to do with it.”

The baron sucks his teeth pensively, as if someone’s just told him that half his army has deserted. A disaster, yes,
but not, in his mind, a cause for despair. “Then we should do what is necessary to fix it. Is this not what you’ve been suggesting?”

N’Doch grins to hide the sudden grip of fear on his gut. “Put up or shut up, huh? I guess that makes it unanimous, but for . . . well, whadda you say now, preacher man?”

Leif Cauldwell moans softly. “May the One help me. Do it.”

T
he elevator ride to the top of the mountain takes longer than Paia’s memory of the trip to the heights of the Citadel. Bathed in the flat white light, both alien and familiar, she wonders if her father knew of this facility, perhaps had dealings with its builders, perhaps even rode in this very car. After the collapse of order, the House Comp has told her, contact with the outside became dangerous, even between former friends and allies, especially if you had something they lacked, like power or good water.

Her father is very much on Paia’s mind, as if the memory of him might help her face the terrible choice that awaits her on the mountaintop. Her head has cleared of Leif’s soporific, though there’s a dull pounding between her temples, hangover from the drug, maybe, or simple exhaustion. She’s hoped that settling her brain might help settle her decision. She feels a lot more like the self she recognizes, but her head aches and her dilemma remains:
how can I betray him?

She’d snatched a moment with Leif in the communications room, while the possible backlash from Erde’s plan was being hurriedly prepared for. He was in motion, distracted, giving orders. His people flowed around them, moving weaponry and children and supplies. Still, they talked, in snatches, as if both of them needed the exchange in order to move onward. They talked about the past, about her father, about his death. Paia realized that her father had broken his nephew’s heart.

“He lost hope. He . . . gave up! He’d never done that! Ever! I was . . . desperate, furious. Maybe I was getting back at him for dying when I joined up with the Beast. By
the time I came to my senses, well . . .” Leif grabbed the arm of a man hurrying past. “Marcus! Send someone down the tunnels to check the seals!”

She should be angry with him for drugging her, for kidnapping her, for setting all this in motion. But how could she blame him for wanting to fix things? He still cared so much. Paia studied his handsome face, so familiar, trying to place it in her childhood. “You were one of his aides then? How could I not have known you?”

He grinned at her crookedly. “I was around sometimes. Mostly I was out in the field. Shuttling from meeting to meeting. We were the ones they sent out, the young ones who didn’t have families. They’d always invite him, but after a while, they knew the best they were going to get was me. Then it got hard to get from meeting to meeting. I never made it home in between. I was stuck in a bunker in South Africa when the word came that he was . . . that he’d passed away.”

Leif stared at the stack of books he’d picked up absently, then shrugged and put it down. He glanced at Constanze in mute appeal as she edged past with two children in tow. She paused, leaned her head against his arm for a fraction, then moved on. Leif cleared his throat. “The com-net was badly shredded by then. The news itself was a month old. It took me seven months to get back here. By then, it was too late . . . 
he
had arrived.” He looked away, signaling to a woman across the room to hurry. “If I’d been there, Paia! If only I’d been there, I could’ve kept the Old Man alive, I know I could have! Could’ve kept him from sinking into despair. Together, we could’ve fought the Beast off somehow!”

“You don’t know that,” Paia soothed automatically.

The Beast. The God. The Dragon. But no longer the only dragon. One of four. The black sheep of the family.

As if she had spoken out loud, Leif waved Luther over. “You go on up there with them. I know you want to. But keep an eye on this one.” He shook Paia’s shoulder, not ungently. “If he shows, she’ll run back to him in an instant. She won’t have any choice.”

And then he’d marshaled his own aides, gathered up the rest of the children, and gone down to the big cavern to be with “his people” for whatever might occur. Unlike her
father, Leif Cauldwell had not given up. Except on the God.

She won’t have any choice
.

Paia wonders. It may be wrong, but she misses him, his edgy magnificence, his energy, even his sharp tongue and cruel wit. Will he come for her this time? A surge of ambivalence and guilt presses Paia back against the cool metal side of the elevator. She has her own darkness to make peace with. If all the tales are true, she has been abetting a monster.

Monster
.

She has called him that herself, to his perfect, golden face. But wrapped in her cocoon of safety and privilege, she meant it in an entirely personal way. She never thought to extrapolate his endless capacity for emotional cruelty into a notion of how he might behave out in the world. She just didn’t think.

Now she can do nothing but think, as her head pounds and the elevator continues its silent ascent.

Paia lets her aching head loll back against the metal wall. Baron Köthen watches her from across the cab, keeping a cool public distance but fooling no one. He looks concerned, as if he senses she is not entirely recovered. Paia knows their sudden and inexplicable attachment is causing Erde a lot of anguish. Paia is sorry for it, but it’s like asking the sun not to shine. Did she not dream him even before he arrived? Nothing to be done, except adopt a certain decorum in the girl’s presence. Because Paia is so sure of him, she has no impatience, only deep, stirring tremors of anticipation. She smiles at him wanly, as if she has known him forever, this beautiful stranger from another millennium. A quiet light blooms in his eyes. Paia’s glad she’s given up asking the world to make sense.